Wind River’s message is at odds with its instincts

Not since William A. Wellman’s Track of the Cat has a film respected the power of cold on the human body like Wind River. Blizzards dump down feet of powder with biblical force, covering every inch of the Wyoming countryside with a thick white blanket. Long periods of exposure turn feet blue and lungs red, hardening skin and exploding blood vessels with equal certainty. Dense snow packs aren’t just majestic backdrops, they become symbolic of the collective immobilization afflicting an entire way of life.

The isolated region is home to the Wind River Native American Reservation, a vast and unforgiving space where the Eastern Shoshone and the Northern Arapaho tribes live in exile from modern society. Poverty, drug abuse and violence have left the residents further compromised, turning the community into a prison with no walls.

This frostbitten setting provides an epic backdrop for writer/director Taylor Sheridan’s pulpy neo-western, which uses B-movie tropes to address the ongoing trauma enacted by American government intuitions on indigenous peoples. FBI Agent Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen) experiences this resentment almost immediately upon arriving to investigate the death of a young woman whose body was discovered miles from the nearest habitation by local hunter Cory Lambert (Jeremy Renner). Due to inadequate local police presence, the two team up to try and solve the case.

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Wind River is more spiritual revenge film than police procedural, one that relies upon certain thematic binaries to bluntly express itself. Cory talks about the two options someone faces in the woods (“survival and surrender”), and the relationship between predator and prey that applies to both wild animal and human. There’s also a distressing subtext regarding parental failure, which produces a feeling of grief that even the most judicial violence can’t quell.

Such primal territory is a slight diversion from the forceful political genre engineering of Sheridan’s previous scripts for Hell or High Water and Sicario. Yet somehow Wind River ends up being even more clunky and sanctimonious about minority identity and disenfranchisement, attempting to cover its tracks with sharp western dialogue (“Luck don’t live out here”) and pummeling, close-quarter violence. Often, the film successfully sets aside its moralism for down and dirty thrills. The extended climax that takes place at a fuel company drill site rivals the tense border standoff in Sicario, proving once again that Sheridan has a uniquely visceral fetish for devastating sniper fire.

Jane and Cory aren’t immune to the chaos that envelops them both, but they do feel like aloof Anglo vessels gaining revenge for the helpless victims and family members that can’t (or aren’t allowed) to speak for themselves. The issue of jurisdiction comes up a lot in Wind River, and one gets the sense Sheridan isn’t just talking about the physical kind, but also the mental and spiritual spaces that have been taken away from local tribes.

By the time title cards flash over the end credits lamenting the lack of missing person statistics regarding Native American women, Wind River reveals itself to be a full-fledged message movie. This shift in tone, while not surprising considering the cartoonish villains and muted sentiment, goes against the film’s natural instincts to move and sound like the trio of wild mountain lions Cory spends much of the film hunting.

Olsen does her best Emily Blunt impression, watching manly situations devolve until she’s forced to stand her ground with convincing force. Renner’s tortured mountain man could have been a stock character, but he infuses the outsider archetype with fitting organic fury. Wind River, which opens Friday, Aug. 11, never does either character’s complexities much justice. Instead, it keeps them both sturdy and one-dimensional, as if to remind the audience that they too are occupying forces despite whatever worthy intentions send them into the cold.